It just dawned on me this morning that my stats have been on the fritz for a while. Apparently the kubuntu distribution upgrade borked the mysql setup and the daemon was not being launched properly. This should be fixed from now on. sorry for the inconvenience.Cheers,Marc

Just popping my head in to say hi.Also wondering if the team is going to try and go on a gauntlet or something like it used to. It almost seams like this group is dying off. There are only 15 or so active users it looks like.

well it's been a nice run.I've been doing dc stats for a number of years, long past the time I've been active in the ars dc community but at this point it's time to move on. I'm shutting my stats server down. You can find excellent stats for SoB on free-dc's excellent site: http://stats.free-dc.org/stats.php?page=proj&proj=sobI'll still be lurking and contributing to the odd ars DC team off and on

I also returned not too long ago and just added another 8 core Xeon server for "extended burn-in" today.

Since it seems the SOB site doesnt get updated very frequently, what is the most current client for modern hardware? How do I make sure I'm maximizing the hardware? Currently, I just load the client and let it run in whatever default mode comes up.

yea this doesn't seem to be performing to the standards.. not sure why.

Only thing I have changed is RAM usage since I have lots of available ram right now.

I also have a dual Xeon E5410 available (until July) but it crashes whenever I run Prime95 for ~10 hours. I think it might be a bad CPU but don't know how to approach Intel with it since it is 1.5 years old..

Strange thing is that I was in the ~90s with the same setup (minus the 8 core new machine and plus one E5410 1x cpu machine) until 4/17. Does the type of work make that much of a difference? Everything is on Auto for now.

Any suggestions are welcome. all the above machines are available and ready for work!

yea this doesn't seem to be performing to the standards.. not sure why.

Only thing I have changed is RAM usage since I have lots of available ram right now.

I also have a dual Xeon E5410 available (until July) but it crashes whenever I run Prime95 for ~10 hours. I think it might be a bad CPU but don't know how to approach Intel with it since it is 1.5 years old..

Strange thing is that I was in the ~90s with the same setup (minus the 8 core new machine and plus one E5410 1x cpu machine) until 4/17. Does the type of work make that much of a difference? Everything is on Auto for now.

Any suggestions are welcome. all the above machines are available and ready for work!

Well, Intel should support Retail processors for more than 1.5 years - have you looked at the various Torture Test options? IIRC, Option 1 is the most CPU intensive - you can try the 3 different options and see which of them fail out ( 2 and 3 are more RAM intensive, I think - it is fairly explanatory in the testing)

Once you have (hopefully) narrowed it down to CPU or RAM, you can use the magic words "RMA" and "Advance Exchange"

Well, Intel should support Retail processors for more than 1.5 years - have you looked at the various Torture Test options? IIRC, Option 1 is the most CPU intensive - you can try the 3 different options and see which of them fail out ( 2 and 3 are more RAM intensive, I think - it is fairly explanatory in the testing)

Since this is a production server (even though it has nearly no load), I cant be doing torture tests during the day and risk bringing it down. I'll try something over the weekend to see if I can get a repeatable result. Without the heavy load from crunching it has been perfectly stable.

Also, it seems that the new machine I added last week (the 8 core xeon) is not reporting statistics or at least they are not being attributed to me. What could be the culprit? Server communication seems to be working and it looks like my ID is being reported properly.

Actually, I think I may have fixed the issue. This is a 2U supermicro server and the font of the 2U is covered with drive caddys followed by a row of fans, then the CPUs and then the RAM. The drive caddys come with plastic trays that block airflow when they are empty (the caddys have a plastic spacer that is slightly larger than an actual hard drive) and the SATA cables behind the backplane blocked all the air slots. After a test and crash, the RAM (even with heatsinks) was too hot to touch, being AFTER all the other stuff and having restricted flow from the caddys and blocking SATA cables.

I moved the cables, removed 2 unused drive trays, and also found the server was in "workstation" cooling mode. I made that "server" mode to run the fans at 100% all the time and the machine seems to be stable so far.

I also found the communication problem. windows (S2K8R2) firewall was blocking the app so it started up in "do any work I can find" mode. Once I deleted the client and restarted it with a connection it started right up with SOB work.

As a result you should see my stats increase significantly - there are now 16 more cores available!